Members of Congress publicly condemned the white nationalists who’d gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. “The views fueling this spectacle are repugnant,” House Speaker Paul Ryan declared on Saturday. “I wholeheartedly oppose their actions,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell added. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged her fellow Americans to support diversity and “reject hate,” while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the march and rally were “against everything the flag stands for.”

But the protesters weren’t waving the stars and stripes. America’s resurgent white-nationalist movement thrives on the power of imagery and symbolism, especially the symbols of the Confederacy. And right in the United States Capitol, there’s a collection of monuments to their cause.

Thanks to segregationist Southern state legislatures in the early 20th century, eight statues of Confederate leaders currently reside in the National Statuary Hall Collection on Capitol Hill. They include Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Vice President Alexander Stephens, and Lee, whose Charlottesville monument was the focal point of this weekend’s strife. These bronze and marble figures, standing in the center of American democracy, pay tribute to the same authoritarian forces that congressional leaders eagerly denounced.

States can voluntarily swap out their statues for new ones at will, thanks to a 2000 amendment to the original federal law authorizing the collection. But Congress is ultimately responsible for what can and can’t be kept within the Capitol; the senators and representatives who condemned the marchers in Charlottesville have the power to clean their own house by banning Confederate statues.

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The collection’s origins date back to 1864, although the Capitol has been home to sculptures since its construction. The idea was elegant in its simplicity: Under the original authorizing law, each of the states could commission two statues “in marble or bronze … of deceased persons who have been citizens thereof.” The bill called on the states to accordingly honor citizens who were “illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services such as each state may deem to be worthy of this national commemoration.” Once completed, the chosen statues would then be placed in the old House chamber in the Capitol building, which was renamed National Statuary Hall.

States responded, albeit slowly, by commissioning the likenesses of a variety of eminent Americans in the ensuing decades. Connecticut, for example, sent marble sculptures to Washington in 1872 of Roger Sherman, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, and Jonathan Trumbull, the only colonial governor to join the revolution when it broke out. Massachusetts contributed one of the famed revolutionary leaders Samuel Adams in 1876 for the nation’s centennial; Pennsylvania proffered the inventor Robert Fulton, who made steamboats a viable means of transportation, in 1896.

But many Southern states took a different approach. At the turn of the 20th century, the Democratic Party’s counterrevolution against Reconstruction-era reforms had reached its apex. “Redeemed” states drafted new constitutions to exclude black Americans from political life and restrict their civil rights. Violence had also returned to the forefront of Southern political life. White supremacists in North Carolina overthrew a multiracial local government in Wilmington in 1898 in the only successful coup d’etat in American history. After Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1903, South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman remarked that the president’s invitation “will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.”

Against this perilous backdrop, legislators in Virginia’s redeemed General Assembly began to discuss sending a statue of Robert E. Lee to take up an honored place in the nation’s capital. The state reserved one of its two allocated statues for George Washington, an obvious and universally hailed choice. But for the second slot, the legislature rejected efforts to commission statues of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and other famous Virginians. Only Lee would be allowed to join the father of the nation in the heart of the republic.

News of Virginia’s plans prompted outrage elsewhere in the country. Kansas legislators threatened to send a statue of John Brown, the hardline abolitionist executed by Virginia for organizing a slave revolt there in 1859, to join Lee in the Capitol if the Old Dominion placed him there. “I do not know about John Brown, but I do know there is one man who will fight against putting Lee’s statue in the hall,” Kansas Representative Charles Curtis said in 1903, referring to himself. “I think it will be a disgrace. He was a traitor to his country, and I will not sanction an official honor for a traitor.”

Nonetheless, Virginia’s General Assembly approved $10,000 for the Lee statue in 1908. It took its place in the halls of Congress, dressed in full Confederate uniform, in August 1909. Criticism kept pouring in, especially from northern and western states. Idaho Senator Weldon Heyburn held the floor by himself for nearly an hour to denounce the move and urge Virginians to reconsider. “I understand the senator represents 264 Negroes and that’s all,” scoffed the aptly named Arkansas Senator Jeff Davis during the speech. “If there are 264 Negroes in Idaho, I represent them,” Heyburn fired back.

Jefferson Davis’s life-sized likeness adorned the political center of the country he tried to destroy.

Union Army veterans, many in their 60s and 70s by then, also protested. The Grand Army of the Republic’s Chicago post denounced the statue “as against public policy, against the fundamental principles of our republic, and against the honor and integrity of the veterans who nobly gave up life and home to preserve the country Robert E. Lee attempted to destroy.” The GAR’s New York department went even further by asking Attorney General George Wickersham to intervene and remove the statue.

Wickersham responded with a formal legal opinion, endorsed by President William Howard Taft, concluding that no law barred Lee’s placement in the Capitol. Beyond the legal issues, he also praised the wisdom of Lee’s selection. “Robert E. Lee has come to be generally regarded as typifying not only all that was best in the cause to which at the behest of his native state he gave his services,” Wickersham opined, “but also the most loyal and unmurmuring acceptance of the complete overthrow of that cause.” He also defended Virginia’s decision to place Lee in a Confederate uniform, claiming the depiction “eloquently [testified] to the fact that a magnanimous country has completely forgiven an unsuccessful effort to destroy the Union.”

This is the Lost Cause portrayal of Lee at its most supine—the chivalrous and reluctant warrior-statesman whose loyalties during the war lay with Virginia itself, and not with slavery. The characterization became dominant even in the North as the 20th century progressed. But it is the stuff of myth, a pernicious one that my colleague Adam Serwer has thoroughly dismantled. In reality, Lee was a cruel slaveowner whose army enslaved free black Northerners during its invasion of Pennsylvania and massacred black Union soldiers at the Battle of the Crater. During Reconstruction, he opposed racial equality and urged Congress to reject black suffrage.

Seven other Confederate statues subsequently followed Lee into the Capitol. North Carolina put forth a bronze rendition of Zebulon Vance, the state’s Confederate governor during the war, in 1916. Florida sent Edmund Kirby Smith, the last Confederate general to surrender, in 1922. From Alabama came Confederate cavalryman Joseph Wheeler in 1925. (The state also sent a statue of Confederate officer Jabez Curry, but replaced it with one of Helen Keller in 2009.) In 1929, South Carolina commissioned one in honor of Wade Hampton, who fought against the Union at Gettysburg and won the state’s governorship in 1876 with the help of white-supremacist paramilitary groups.

Georgia sent a statue of Alexander Stephens, an unalloyed white supremacist who served as the Confederacy’s vice president, in 1927. In an infamous speech made shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter in 1861, Stephens had made clear why the seceding states wanted to break away from the Union. “Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” he declared.

The process concluded in 1931 when Mississippi sent statues of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s only president, and James Z. George, a Confederate colonel who signed the state’s ordinance of secession, to fill its two spots. Their arrival came without apparent protest, despite the potency of what it symbolized. Davis had led a war against the United States for five years to create an independent nation where the enslavement of human beings could survive and flourish. Now his life-sized likeness adorned the political center of the country he tried to destroy.

America’s national symbols are too synonymous with democracy and pluralism to be readily appropriated by white nationalists.

Lee’s statue was installed in the Capitol without fanfare because of the controversy surrounding it. Davis, on the other hand, received a respectful unveiling ceremony led by Southern senators and Davis’s great-granddaughter. House and Senate chaplains gave benedictions. The U.S. Marine Band played patriotic songs. Mississippi’s Pat Harrison, who helped orchestrate the defeat of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in a 1922 filibuster, had the gall to cast the Confederate statues’ arrivals as a healing moment for the nation, according to The New York Times’ account of the ceremony.

“When,” [Harrison] said, “that martial and stately figure of Robert E. Lee was placed by Virginia in this rotunda, it was the beginning of a finer feeling between the sections; when Alabama selected that heroic figure of Joe Wheeler to occupy a place of honor in this historic hall, it kindled still warmer fires of common understanding.

“When Florida answered her invitation with a salute to E. Kirby Smith, it was a rebel yell for a common country. When Georgia graced this hall with the figure of Alexander Stephens, a further step was taken in the cementing process of the two nations.

“And today, as Mississippi places here two illustrious and matchless military geniuses, statesmen and leaders in this hall, the last link is forged in the chain that will forever hold our country together.”

There was applause when the names of Lee, Wheeler, Smith, and Stephens were mentioned, but the loudest outburst came as Senator Harrison made a reference to a “united nation.”

Harrison’s warm remarks glazed over the unspoken reality of what the statues represented. Reunion after the war was between Northern whites and Southern whites alone, one that symbolically excised black Americans from the body politic. By honoring Confederate leaders in the Capitol, Southern legislatures consecrated the white-supremacist regimes that had reconquered the South after Reconstruction. Their political order would endure another three decades before the civil-rights movement dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow.

The Confederate monuments erected across the country represent a similar rejection of American democracy and pluralism, as my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has noted, making them sites of veneration for white nationalists from coast to coast. This embrace is as pragmatic as it is ideological. Every movement needs its symbols. Far-right groups in Europe typically draw from deep reservoirs of national iconography—the English Defense League and the St. George’s cross, neo-Nazi groups and German paganism. But America’s national symbols are too synonymous with democracy and pluralism to be readily appropriated by white nationalists. Even Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong slaveowner who defended states’ rights, wrote the immortal phrase declaring that all men are created equal. That leaves the imagery of the Confederacy—the apostates of the American civic faith—as the most accessible wellspring of symbolic power.

To see this resonance, look no further than Peter Cvjetanovic. The 20-year-old college student from Reno, Nevada, traveled 2,600 miles to attend the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville this weekend. A photographer took a picture of his torchlit face during the event on Friday night, featuring his mouth agape in what appears to be a furious yell. It went viral across Facebook and Twitter on Saturday.

Classmates quickly identified Cvjetanovic and reporters reached out to him to comment. In an interview with a local news outlet on Sunday, he openly identified himself as a white nationalist. He also made efforts to rehabilitate his public image. “I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo,” he told KTVN.

Cvjetanovic then clearly stated the purpose of his long journey, and the journeys of hundreds of others: to defend Lee’s statue against the city’s plans to remove it. “I do believe that the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland,” he said. “Robert E. Lee is a great example of that. He wasn’t a perfect man, but I want to honor and respect what he stood for during his time.” That a young man would travel across the North American continent for this underscores the power these statues can hold.

Even without the historical circumstances of the Capitol Hill statues’ arrival, there is virtually no justification for their continued presence. Nor can it be said there aren’t better native sons and daughters to honor. Virginia could replace Lee with John Marshall, the legendary chief justice and father of the American rule of law, or Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington. If it needs a Civil War hero, why not George Henry Thomas? Alabama could select author Harper Lee or jazz legend Nat King Cole. Georgia could replace Stephens with Casimir Pulaski, a Polish Revolutionary War hero who died in the battle of Savannah, or a full statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., who already has a bust elsewhere in the Capitol. This is not a novel idea, nor is it unprecedented. Florida’s legislature has recently debated replacing both of its lackluster statues with those of more eminent persons. Alabama already replaced one of its selections with a tribute to Helen Keller. The statues are supposed to represent the finest these states have to offer.

No state’s choices for the statuary collection will receive unanimous acclaim; civil disagreement is a democratic virtue. But honoring Confederate leaders is fundamentally different. By defending slavery with gunfire and cannonade, they prolonged the life of an institution that brought indescribable suffering and horrors to millions. By waging war against the Union to do so, they betrayed the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans. If Democratic and Republican lawmakers truly reject the ideology that paraded through the streets of Charlottesville, the only logical conclusion is to expel it from their own halls and chambers as well.

This article originally stated that there are seven Confederate statues on display in the Capitol building. We regret the error.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The preacher, dead at 99, advised presidents, mentored clergy, and influenced millions of people. Will his legacy of non-partisan outreach continue?

Billy Graham, the famous preacher who reached millions of people around the world through his Christian ministry, died on Wednesday at 99. Over the course of more than six decades, he reshaped the landscape of evangelism, sharing the gospel from North Carolina to North Korea and developing innovative ways to communicate the message of the Bible. He influenced generations of pastors and developed friendships with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty around the world. His death marks the end of an era for evangelicalism, and poses a fundamental question: Will his legacy of bipartisan, ecumenical outreach be carried forward?

Graham came up as a preacher during the post-war era, a time when American Christianity was being radically remade. “When Billy came on the scene, fundamentalism, as it’s called, was really prevalent,” said Greg Laurie, the pastor of the California megachurch Harvest Christian Fellowship and member of the board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, in an interview. “Billy wanted to broaden the base and reach more people.”

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.